Yes, West Virginia is in fact part of the continuous United States; however, for a Miami girl whose natural habitat is closer to Manhattan than the greenery shown above, I will claim West Virginia as a foreign country--at least to me and for the purposes of this plink.

Having firmly established my alien status southwest of the Mason Dixon line let's get to the miracle. As many of you may remember, Ganesha, a multifaceted Hindu deity renown for his power to remove obstacles, made world-wide headlines in 1996 for his lust for milk. Ganesha statues across India and other Buddhist hot spots had been seen actually consuming milk left behind by devotees.

Being college students my friends and I naturally wondered why milk and not beer, but I digress. Being a group of open-minded-multi-cultural-let's-all- get-along-yet-rational-democrats, we also wondered if the reports could have any grain of truth or if this was yet another ploy by the "Got Milk" campaign to hook more americans on a calf's diet. The answer was obvious: ROAD TRIP.

And so we embarked armed with twinkies, slurppes, slim jims, a 1987 map and an orange on our Ganesha dairy quest. After much confusion and way too many slim jims in an enclosed space (you all know what I'm talking about) we arrived at the temple, were greeted and told of the next scheduled milk drinking. Talk about organized miracle making!

We patiently waited being thankful for fresh air. Alas the moment was here, Ganesha was thirsty again. They poured the milk over his elephant head and voila...it dripped all over the place. Many "oohhed" and "ahhed", I sighed. Where's the straw? There's no parting of the lips? How does one measure the actual consumption...some sort of holy displacement test?

But my companions were undeterred in their conviction that Ganesha had indeed drank the milk and that the miracle had been verified and Hinduism properly franchised to West Virginia. If you ask me, THAT was the miracle, never mind Ganesha's apparent calcium deficiency.